Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) relies on models that can create new content in the form of text, media, code, etc. GenAI is used in a variety of globally popular tools such as Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, or Gemini. Its appeal is linked to its ability to ingest the characteristics of its input and use this data to generate new information with similar attributes.
This guide is intended to help students at Normandale Community College navigate the evolving terrain of GenAI. It provides guidance on using GenAI, methods to disclose and cite it, ethical considerations, and tips for effective prompting. There are also links to a variety of other supportive materials throughout the guide.
This guide was adapted by Normandale Community College from "Artificial Intelligence by Students" by Minnesota State University, Mankato Library Sources. The Guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
- Always confirm with your professor whether AI tools like Microsoft Copilot are allowed for each assignment.
- To understand which tools involve generative AI, consult AI Tools: Where They Are and What to Know.
- If your professor allows the use of generative AI tools, protect personal data by only using secure tools you access with your StarID and password.
- As a Normandale student, you have access to a licensed version of Microsoft Copilot, which securely protects your data when you log into it in the following ways:
- Through your Microsoft 365 OneDrive Account on D2L via the cloud icon.
- Through the Microsoft Edge or Chrome Browser at m365.cloud.microsoft
- When prompted, enter your starID@go.minnstate.edu and your password.
- Use a generative AI tool responsibly:
- Always verify information and sources generated by AI tools.
- Understand that AI has been known to generate false information and to cite non-existent sources.
- Consider that AI-generated text mines people’s intellectual property without crediting them, which raises ethical concerns.
- For guidance on disclosing and citing AI use and AI-generated content, defer to any specific guidelines provided by your professors, but you may also consult the resources provided below:
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is typically defined as presenting someone else's work or ideas as one's own, including work generated by AI. Individual policies for using and crediting AI tools vary from class to class. Make sure you look at your syllabus and have a clear understanding of your professor's expectations.
False Citations
AI tools can create false citations. Providing false citations in research, whether intentionally or unintentionally, violates academic honesty policies related to improper citation. AI tools such as Copilot have been known to generate false citations (hallucinations). Even if the citations represent actual papers, the cited content in Copilot or another tool might still be inaccurate.
Recommendations
- Know your professors' policies for AI use in every class.
- If AI tools are only permitted for topic development in the early stages of research, you might not need to cite them, but it's still important to check with your professor first.
- If you are providing commentary or analysis on the text generated by a chatbot and are either paraphrasing its results or quoting it directly, a citation is always required. You can find more information on citing AI tools on this guide.
AI outputs can be prone to misinformation and bias. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the accuracy of AI-generated content using lateral reading strategies. The strategies outlined here can help you to do so.
- Carefully review the AI-generated content to identify specific facts, statistics, statements, and references that should be verified.
- Cross-check these whether pieces of information are true using reliable sources. If you cannot verify the information, the output is not reliable.
- Look for multiple sources that support the AI-generated claims. Just one source supporting a piece of information is not enough.
- Evaluate the credibility of the sources you use to verify information generated by AI.
- Verify citations provided by AI. Sometimes generative AI creates false citations. Search for the exact paper in an academic database. If you can't find the paper, it may not exist. Ask a librarian to help, as needed!
Learn more about lateral reading.
Unless otherwise directed by your instructor, we recommend you include an AI Use Disclosure statement in your assignment any time you cite AI-generated content and any time you use AI tools as part of your assignment process (even if you are not citing AI-generated content directly).
A good place to put the statement is after the body of your essay and before the References. Include in your statement the following:
- The AI tools you used
- 2 - 5 sentences about how you used them
- How you edited or verified the generated content
AI Use Disclosure
I used Copilot to help me find a television commercial that fits the goals of this assignment. It gave me the example of the Nike "Dream Big" commercial and explained how some of the technical elements relate to the polysemy of commodities. I watched the commercial, used my textbook to verify that Copilot's categorization of elements was correct, and used my class notes to apply these technical elements to the commercial.
Misinformation
Generative AI tools can help users brainstorm ideas, organize information, plan scholarly discussions, and summarize sources. However, they are also notorious for not always using factual information or rigorous research strategies. They are known for producing "hallucinations," a term used to describe false information created by AI systems to defend their statements. "Hallucinations" can be presented confidently and consist of partially or fully fabricated citations or facts.
AI tools also have been used to intentionally produce false images or audiovisual recordings to spread misinformation and mislead the audience. Referred to as "deep fakes," these materials can be utilized to subvert democratic processes and are thus particularly dangerous.
Additionally, the information provided by generative AI tools may not be current, as some systems do not have access to the latest information. Rather, they may have been trained on past datasets and generate dated representations of current events and the related information landscape.
Bias
Another limitation of AI is the bias that can be embedded in the products it generates. These large language model systems are trained to predict the most likely sequence of words in response to a given prompt and will therefore reflect and perpetuate the biases inherent in the information they were trained on. An additional source of bias is the use of reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to refine generative AI tools. The human testers used to provide feedback to AI are themselves non-neutral. Accordingly, generative AI tools like Copilot can provide output that is socio-politically biased. It can also generate sexist, racist, or otherwise offensive information.
Recommendations for Use
- Verify all of the information produced by generative AI. This includes checking the source of all citations the AI uses to support its claims to make sure the information generated by AI accurately reflects the contents of these resources.
- Critically evaluate all AI output for any biases that could skew the presented information.
- Use lateral reading to evaluate sources.
- Avoid asking the AI tools to produce a list of sources on a specific topic. These prompts may result in the tools fabricating false citations.
- When available, consult the AI developers' notes to determine if the tool's information is up to date.
- Always remember that generative AI tools are not search engines. These tools simply use large amounts of data to generate responses constructed to "make sense" according to the algorithms they've been given and the data they've been trained on.
U.S. Copyright law related to the use of AI is still evolving.
Do generative AI tools violate U.S. Copyright Law?
There are currently several court cases directly relating to the unauthorized use of copyrighted material as training data for generative AI tools. Individual authors, artists, and companies are suing OpenAI, GitHub, and other companies for using their work when training their AI products.
Some library content providers prohibit any amount of their content being used with AI tools. Do not upload library materials (i.e., articles, ebooks, infographics, psychographics, or other datasets) into AI unless you know our licensing allows this use.
Copyright versus plagiarism
Copyright violation is not the same as plagiarism. While plagiarism can be considered fraud if funding is involved, it is largely considered an issue of research integrity and ethics. There is currently no consensus over whether generative AI tools are engaging in plagiarism when they scrape data to generate content.
Breaches of Privacy
There are multiple privacy concerns associated with the use of generative AI tools. The most prominent issues revolve around the possibility of a breach of personal/sensitive data. Most free generative AI tools require users to input large amounts of data to be trained and generate new information products effectively. This translates into personal or sensitive user-submitted data becoming an integral part of the collection of material used to further train the AI without the explicit consent of the user. Moreover, certain generative AI policies permit AI developers to profit off of this personal/sensitive information by selling it to third parties.
Recommendations for Privacy
- Avoid sharing any personal or sensitive information via AI-powered tools.
- Never upload another person’s work, including classmates’ work and instructor materials, to a generative AI tool without the person’s consent.
- Always review the privacy policy of the generative AI tools before utilizing them. Be cautious about policies that permit the input data to be freely distributed to third-party vendors and/or other users.
- To safeguard personal data and intellectual property protocols, you are advised to use only campus-vetted AI tools that require StarID credentials to access, such as Microsoft Copilot.
Microsoft Copilot is a generative AI platform endorsed by Minnesota State. When it is accessed with your StarID credentials at https://m365.cloud.microsoft/, Copilot provides Normandale students and employees additional data security and protection of non-public data used with the service.
Consult this resource for more information: AI Tools: Where They Are and What to Know
Why Craft Good Prompts?
A prompt is input to an AI tool. Good prompts help the AI help you. A well-crafted prompt enables the AI to give you meaningful and useful results. A bad prompt may result in irrelevant data or lead you away from the best research.
If you want better information, you must ask for better information. Chatbots often seem to be optimized for minimum compute -- ask a simple question, get a simple answer. To use AI effectively, your prompts must define the kind of response you need.
The CLEAR Framework
Good prompts are CLEAR – a framework developed by Leo Lo, a librarian and professor at the University of New Mexico.
| CLEAR Framework | Good Example | Needs Improvement |
|---|---|---|
|
Concise (also Clear): |
Identify the top reasons students attend Normandale Community College. |
I am trying to figure out if I should be applying to NCC and if I would like it there. (The AI doesn't know you or your preferences, there are multiple "NCC" institutions, & are you applying to high school? Undergrad? What are your goals?) |
|
Logical: If your question doesn’t make sense to you (or to someone else), it probably won’t make sense to the AI! |
Summarize the most promising vaccine candidates that protect against multiple strains of influenza. |
Can we make a flu vaccine organically? (Are you asking about a vaccine made with eggs obtained through organic farming? A vaccine developed through "organic" research? Something else?) |
|
Explicit: |
Give me a concise summary of the major strengths and weaknesses of Normandale Community College. |
What’s Normandale Community College like? (What's your comparison for Normandale Community College? Do you want a short answer or a long one? What aspects of the college matter to you?) |
Even the best prompts may need improvement! The last two components address what to do after you’ve examined the AI’s answer to your initial prompt.
| CLEAR Framework | Example |
|---|---|
|
Adaptive: |
Prompt 1: Why doesn’t the rapid bus line go to Normandale Community College? (Generative AI tool's response includes "historical reasons") Prompt 2: What are the historical and funding challenges of extending the rapid bus line to Normandale Community College? |
|
Reflective: You may need to craft additional prompts that specifically target gaps in the initial answer. |
Prompt 1: Give me a concise summary of the major strengths and weaknesses of Normandale Community College. (Generative AI tool's response is too general for the prompter's need) Prompt 2: Give me a concise summary of the major strengths and weaknesses of Normandale Community College, from the perspective of a first-generation college student. |
Read more about the CLEAR framework in Lo, L. S. (2023). The CLEAR path: A framework for enhancing information literacy through prompt engineering. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 49(4), 102720–. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102720